Today's Gospel from Matthew ends with these harsh, even scary words, from Jesus:
"His master summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me to.
Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you?’
Then in anger his master handed him over to the torturers until he should pay back the whole debt.
So will my heavenly Father do to you, unless each of you forgives your brother from your heart.”
No matter how hard we try to nuance the words of Jesus, it is clear that forgiveness was a very big deal for Jesus. He was not ambiguous. He was not simply calling us to a higher ideal. He clearly meant it with towards and tone that were unmistakable. Most people wrestle with this reality and try to come up with some wiggle-room around Jesus' words. One approach some use is to say that, of course, we forgive so and so, but we can never forget what they did. I do this myself, but deep down, I can't come up with a comfort level that this is what God is asking of us.
Nowhere is this more common than in family life. Families can be the Ground Zero for conflict, grudges, and anger for many people. I can easily think of a hundred funerals that I have celebrated where one or more family members were estranged from each other. The number is probably higher than a hundred = because I only knew specifically of these situations. But family grudges, misunderstandings, feuds, estrangements can be a continuous poison in a lot of families. I think of the families where different family members were disowned. I hear about the celebration of holidays that are rich with strife. Often many people are just so undone by family interactions that they eventually try to avoid family gatherings at all. In my own family, some parts of the family I never for decades due to some members being alienated from each other. It was only during the last year of my mother's life that I first learned that I had an additional uncle that no one ever mentioned. Surprise. Surprise. Sigh. Well, it happens.
Some people have these estrangements and keep them quiet. They feel ashamed - and are certain that no one knows about them on the outside - or just feel that everyone else has stable nurturing family relationships and they are the only ones whose family is filled with conflict. It is complicated and filled with pain.
Last night, I came across a brief book review in the New York Times about families with these problems. The title of the book is: Fault Lines - Fractured Families and How to Mend Them. The author is Harold Pillemer, a family sociologist from Cornell. I used the wonderful miracle of the information superhighway and downloaded the book immediately. It was a little heavy, but the writing was profoundly clear and not filled with jargon. For me, it read like a sociological thriller. I could not put it down. It confirmed some hunches, gave me all sorts of ways to understand people and families. I scrapped my homily for Sunday morning and developed a new homily using the insights of this book. There are very few times when I read something and just say, Wow. Last night was one of them.
Let me sum up the major findings: there is some hope for people who are estranged from their families; the problem is far more common than people might think (over 50,000,000 are estranged from their families; estrangement can be addressed; some possible solutions are simple, rather than complex. The bottom line is that many had deeply missed their family experiences and gingerly were open to trying to change things, but naturally were very cautious to do so. The book is about pain and loss - and ways to heal. To use the author's word, ways to mend.
I'm not a therapist. I do not have therapeutic skills. However, I have observed hundreds and hundreds of families in all sorts of situations - I've seen them at their best, at their worst, at their craziest, and at their most mundane. My sociological and analytical skills aren't bad. If experience and some insights count for anything, my hunch is that a lot of people who are estranged from their families or families where people are estranged from them = might find some paths to healing in this book. The path to healing won't be quick, but it is possible. There is hope.
If you're estranged from your family or you have family members who are estranged, this could be a way to heal, to mend. Let God help you. Let you help you.
(This is available from amazon.com, barnes and noble, and other book services.)
